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From: mike@erix.ericsson.se (Mike Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.functional
Subject: Re: How Ada could have prevented the Red Code distributed denial of
    service attack.
Date: 3 Aug 2001 17:21:00 GMT
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Date: 2001-08-03T17:21:00+00:00
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In article <5267be60.0108030900.26d4a4e7@posting.google.com>,
 mjsilva@jps.net (Mike Silva) writes:
|> I've read a lot of speculation that the "Operand Error" in the report
|> was actually a CPU/FPU exception, but this is the most definitive
|> statement I've seen.  In this case it seems reasonable to imagine that
|> the same results would have occurred regardless of the programming
|> language used.

Perhaps not. In a programming language which supports multiple
task/threads/processes/whatever, it is possible to have a run time
system where failure in one task does not cause failure of the whole
system. In languages with unsafe pointers and without bounds checking,
of course one task can still sabotage another task. You can use an MMU
to prevent this, but we would then be talking of _very_ heavy weight
tasking (maybe what's sometimes called an OS :-).

In Erlang, the whole philosophy of error recovery is that erroneous
tasks (processes) *should* fail. A "link" mechanism allows tasks to
monitor each other, so that a "healthy" task can do "damage
control" if another task should fail. This mechanism of course 
also works accross machine boundaries.

Mind you, I guess that in Ariane-5, the damage was probably already
irrecoverable.........

/m

PS. This is getting somewhat off-track for these newsgroups.